Libraries

Matthew Vega 11-02-2021

African-American children line up outside of Albemarle Region bookmobile, Northhampton County, N.C. Image made available through the Public Library History Files collection at the State Library of North Carolina.

In keeping with the Black radical tradition and the story of the Israelites plundering the Egyptians before they fled Egypt (Exodus 12:35-38), I see my job as a library fellow to be transgressive insofar as I encourage students to "steal Egyptian gold." Libraries are not just places to check out books but spaces where transformative visions can be cast, organizers and students can meet, and institutional knowledge can be turned upside down. Much like the late Black Mennonite, Vincent Harding, or modern Black intellectual Fred Moten, I believe it is the work of scholar-activists to figure out ways to be in but not of institutions. In other words, we must figure out ways to redistribute Pharoah’s spoils for the sake of the mixed multitude.

Pictured here, “De claris mulieribus." Photo via RNS, courtesy Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Two of the world’s great libraries — the Vatican Library in Rome and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University — have scanned and loaded the first of 1.5 million pages of ancient Hebrew, Greek, and early Christian manuscripts online Tuesday.

The project brings rare and priceless religious and cultural collections to a global audience for the first time in history.

The website is the first step in a four-year project and it includes the Bodleian’s 1455 Gutenberg Bible — one of only 50 surviving copies.

The $3.3 million project is funded by the Polonsky Foundation, which aims to democratize access to information. Leonard S. Polonsky is chairman of Hansard Global PLC, an international financial services company.

Joshua Witchger 4-09-2012

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When Kevin Barbieux became homeless in 1982, he was new to Nashville. At first, he relates in an e-mail interview, he spent his days hovering around a rescue mission. Then, as he met other homeless people who introduced him to the city’s attractions, he began to explore. He took long walks by the Cumberland River, visited the Tennessee State Museum—and found himself browsing the stacks of the downtown library.

“I wasn’t much of a reader, so I didn’t spent much time [there] initially,” Barbieux writes. “But I did have an interest in photography and art, so once I discovered those books I was at the library for hours at a time. ... The 750s and 770s [were] where I spent my time.”
For Barbieux, these Dewey Decimal numbers were not the vestiges of a dusty, archaic organizational system that few people today use, let alone commit to memory. Beginning with coffee-table art books, the library became a setting of vital importance and a main stop on the road to changing his life.
When public computers came on the scene, Barbieux used them, along with print resources, to research and produce an educational newsletter about homelessness. The library’s fledgling Internet service connected him with others doing the same, such as the publishers of Seattle’s Real Change newspaper. He began to do photography, eventually showing some of his work—which featured what he calls “an eye for inspiration in the mundane”—in galleries. And in August 2002, Barbieux tried his hand at blogging, then a relatively new phenomenon. His blog, The Homeless Guy, which he updated at the library, became an Internet sensation, and donations through the site gave him the funds he needed to get off the street for a time. Thanks to his newfound notoriety, he was also asked to join the mayor’s task force on ending homelessness in Nashville.